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I was rolling on to and off of the balls of my feet, like a Tai Chi form about to escape. “When can I go up there?”
I wanted to see the damage for myself. I had to know if this really was random. I kind of hoped it was.
Static crackled on Officer Douglas’s radio. Then a voice: “Nobody’s here. It doesn’t look like they took anything.”
I jogged up the stairs without waiting for Sofie Douglas’s permission.
The place was trashed, all right. Sofa cushions slit. Drawers overturned. Plants uprooted in dark spills of potting soil. In some corners, my carpet had even been torn off its pad. Stunned, I headed for the bedroom, which was just as bad. All my clothes…!
“Can you tell if anything’s missing, Ms. Sanger?” asked a burly, red-haired officer. “Anything of value?”
“It’s all of value,” I said, more softly than I would have liked. “It’s mine.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean—”
But I held up a hand to cut him off. I knew what he meant. As a test, I checked my jewelry box. There never had been a lot there—even when I was engaged briefly, I used to wear the too-expensive diamond—I had few family heirlooms.
“Nothing’s missing.” I turned and noticed my bedroom TV. It was portable, but it hadn’t been, well, ported. I returned to my living room—the TV and stereo remained there, too, though they’d been upended—and looked into my office. My computer hummed steadily, monitor facedown on the floor. But…
“The CPU’s running,” I said. “I turned it off before I left home this morning.”
Officer Douglas, who’d followed me upstairs, went to look more closely at my computer. The redhead, whose shield identified him as Officer Willis, said, “Does anybody have a key to your home?”
“My parents,” I said. “Two—no, three of my friends.”
He exchanged an amused glance with the other male officer, a tall, graying guy with a mustache.
“And the lady who cleans up for me once a week,” I added. “Oh, and my dog walker.”
Willis looked concerned. “You have a dog?”
As if I would’ve hidden in my car if any dog of mine had been in jeopardy! “Not anymore. She died last fall. I just never bothered to get my key back. I’ve also given a key to my neighbor, so she can check on things when I’m gone. But she’s trustworthy. They all are.”
“Maybe I should’ve asked who doesn’t have a key.”
There were a few.
“I prefer not to empower fear,” I murmured, turning in a circle, and he snorted with male superiority. At least he didn’t use that old line about “a woman as pretty as you,” as if a decent appearance begs for trouble.
Trouble doesn’t wait for invitations.
That’s when I noticed what was left of my curio cabinet. The cabinet itself had been destroyed—lying on its side, the door yanked completely off, cherry wood splintered and every pane of glass smashed. And my collection of statues, inside…
Little more than rubble.
I took a step forward, unbelieving. Chunks of white marble were all that remained of what had once been a twelve-inch Pallas Athena, which I’d bought in Greece. Shards of lapis lazuli had been my Isis-and-Horus statue. My obsidian Shiva was many-armed rubble. My glossy, ceramic Virgin Mary had been smashed to shiny dust. Even the wonderfully fertile Venus, similar to the famous Willendorf figure and carved from granite, had been reduced to round and jagged bits.
There was no way the Venus could have broken like that accidentally. Someone must have pounded on her, hard. Repeatedly. Purposefully.
And in anger.
I’d recently read a news piece about a goddess artifact being similarly destroyed, in a museum in India, and the similarities—as well as my sudden conclusions—unnerved me.
“Wow.” Willis whistled. “What were those?”
“Goddesses,” I said. “I collect statues of ancient goddesses.”
“Were they worth a lot?”
Monetarily? Some more than others—none were originals, thank heavens. But emotionally…
Officer Douglas, from my study doorway, said, “Goddesses? Are you one of those Wiccans?”
“Not exactly,” I told her, fingering the amulet I wore under my shirt. It wasn’t a pentagram, but two interlaced circles called a vesica piscis. I wasn’t technically Wiccan. But our beliefs have surprising similarities.
It’s like I told you.
I come from a very long line of very strong women.
The police all but moved in. They made phone calls and questioned neighbors. Specialists showed up to photograph the wreckage and to dust for fingerprints, more backup than I’d ever expected for a simple break-in. When I asked if this was normal, Officer Willis said, “We’re just trying to be thorough, ma’am.”
I put up with it for insurance reasons, but mainly I just wanted to clean up. Did you know recent studies have shown that while men have a fight-or-flight response to stress, women have a hormone that prompts them to tend-and-be-friend? I hated to see Officer Sofie go, despite her leaving her card with me and telling me to call anytime. But I also wanted space in which to mourn my statues, to put things as much to right as I could…and to consider who could have done such a thing…and why.
I couldn’t help thinking this break-in might somehow be related to the recent destruction of an ancient goblet, the Kali Cup, a week before it could go on display. But that meant things I couldn’t face. Not yet.
I’d barely managed to start straightening the mess, alone at last, when a knock at the door startled me. I don’t like being scared. It goes against almost everything I believe in.
Checking the peephole and catching a glimpse of brown hair, and a familiar face in its usual impersonal mode, didn’t do a lot to improve my mood…or my lingering disorientation.
Lex.
Alexander Rothschild Stuart III and I go back. Way, way back. Worse, he makes me question my life choices almost every time our diverse paths collide. See, he’d be the dream catch for almost any woman—wealthy beyond his unimaginable inheritance, quietly handsome and, despite nearing thirty, still something of a brooding bad boy. Hard to resist, huh?
Hell, even I have a terrible time resisting him, as our roller-coaster history attests to. And I have different views on money and power than a lot of women. At least—I try.
I could also no longer trust either him or his family as far as I could comfortably spit them.
Still, there was that lack-of-resistance thing, and the intimate-history thing, along with no small amount of curiosity. It had been months since I’d so much as glimpsed him, yet there he stood, too self-possessed to even look impatient while I checked him out. Him showing up on the night of my break-in couldn’t have been a coincidence even if I believed in coincidences.
I don’t. But I opened the door.
“Are you all right?” The question came out vague and polite, as if he were making bored chitchat at a cocktail party. Lex has always had that coolness about him—he supposedly can trace his family line back to the Royal House of Scotland, by way of England, so it’s probably all that blue blood chilling in his veins. But the fact that he was here at all, much less this late, belied his nonchalance. So did the powerful energy that instantly roiled between us. “I heard about the break-in.”
“From the police?” I asked. That might explain all the special treatment, mightn’t it? “Or are you a part of the criminal grapevine now?”
He’d been accused of perjury the previous year. Worse, he hadn’t denied it. It had contributed to our latest breakup.
Now my words wrung a hint of a smile from him, an expression that, on Lex, packs a potent punch. “So may I come in? You know I need permission to cross a person’s threshold.”
No, he wasn’t a vampire. He was just being sarcastic.
“You might as well.” I sighed. “Everyone else has tonight.”
So he did, casually touching my arm as he passed me…except that nothing Lex Stuart does is truly casual. He’s got a great poker face, but it’s more as if he’s eternally lying in wait for something, patiently still, ready to pounce.
I’ve only seen him pounce once. I didn’t enjoy it.
“Ouch,” he said, noticing my broken curio cabinet. I’d had to cruise every room before I saw it, but he took it in first thing. “They got the girls?”
“Thoroughly.” I watched him cross to the rubble. I’d been straightening, but I hadn’t gotten to that yet. Once I cleaned it up, I might as well throw it all away—nothing left to save. I wasn’t sure I felt ready for that.
“Bastards.” Lex picked up the round, faceless head of my Willendorfesque Venus—a piece he’d given me when I got my doctorate. We hadn’t even been dating at the time. But he’d sent me the statue for my collection anyway, managing in true Lex fashion to choose something that, despite my best sense, I couldn’t bear to return.
“Luckily none of it was original.”
“This was,” he said.
I gaped at him.
He shrugged, dropped the chunk of rock back onto the carpet, and brushed his fingers on his neatly pressed, thousand-dollar slacks. “You know my family collects antiques.”
Yes, I knew. Beyond last year’s corporate espionage trial, and his still-murky role, his family’s antique collection was one more reason to distrust the Stuarts. Considering my own family’s connection to certain relics, that is. Now this.
“You gave me an original piece of Paleolithic sculpture?” Not counting what something like that would fetch at auction, hadn’t it belonged in a museum? Was owning it even legal?
The Stuarts never had constrained themselves with something so mundane as legalities.
“So did they take anything?” Lex answered my question with his avoidance. “Or was it simple vandalism?”
They were looking for something. The dumped drawers, the gutted cushions, the carpet pulled away from the corners… It was the only logical explanation. I hadn’t cleaned enough of the damage for someone as smart as Lex to miss that, either. And they hated my goddesses. Any guesses?
“I haven’t found anything missing,” I said, noncommittal. “But it’s hard to tell, this early.”
We eyed each other, letting the silence stretch. Me, because I had theories I wanted to protect awhile longer. Him…who could tell? Maybe he had secrets, too. Or it could just be his love of a good competition.
Either way, neither of us ’fessed up to anything.
He turned away first—though it may have been a simple courtesy. “You really need a monitored security system, Mag. If you can’t afford one, I wish you’d let me—”
Blessedly, my phone rang to cut him off before he tried to buy me yet again. Even during the good times, we generally argued when he did that.
Another ring. He turned away to look at other damage, giving me an illusion of privacy. It wasn’t the best circumstance under which to take a phone call, but I didn’t want the answering machine to pick up and broadcast anything to him.
Too bad I’d already rehooked the machine. So I answered. “Hello?”
“How soon can you get to France?” Sure enough, it was my cousin Lil—likely on business Lex shouldn’t know about.
I used every bit of self-control to say, “I have company. Call you back?”
There was a long pause while she took that in. Then Lil asked, “Is it who I think it is?”
Maybe she’s psychic. Maybe she’s just really smart. Does there have to be a difference?
I peeked over my shoulder at Lex. He’d decided to make himself useful and was shelving some of my scattered books, scowling at the destruction.
“I think it is.”
“I’ll call you,” she said, and hung up. Quickly. I wondered if she’d gotten off the line before a trace could be run…assuming anybody was running a trace.
She would call back from a different phone, likely using someone else’s three-way dialing to confuse matters further. Just in case. We’re amateurs at the cloak-and-dagger stuff, but we learn fast. And as much as I hated bowing to that kind of paranoia…well, someone had broken in.
Lex turned back to me, solemn, as I set down the phone. His rich hazel eyes didn’t flinch. “You used to trust me.”
Did he purposefully choose the best way to wound me, or was he just expressing his own pain? I didn’t want to do this again. It had hurt both of us too much the last few times. Still, I couldn’t not answer. “You didn’t used to work for your cousin.”
He tried a wry smile. “I never said Phil isn’t an ass, Mag.”
“And yet you cover for him, despite last year’s trial.”
“In which the charges were dropped.” And they had been. Espionage. Perjury. Insider trading. Unfair monopoly.
Like magic.
“After an undisclosed settlement,” I reminded him. “That you won’t even talk about.”
He took a deep breath. “Because I signed a contract of nondisclosure.”
“Damned convenient, that. The ends don’t always justify the means, Lex. Sometimes the means are everything.”
“The stockholders seem happy enough.”
I said, “So marry one of the stockholders.”
His eyes narrowed. “I was just worried about an old friend, Magdalene. Don’t flatter yourself that there’s more. Marriage hasn’t been on the table for some time.”
I forced myself to say, “Good.”
That brought him up short. It hadn’t been my intention, whether he deserved it or not. And I still didn’t know, couldn’t possibly guess if he really deserved it.
That’s the part that really sucked. Not knowing. And he’d fixed things so I would never know.
“Oh, Lex, I didn’t mean it that way.” I crossed to his side, torn. An enemy I could fight. An ally I could love. But what could I do with him? “What I meant was, you deserve to be happy, and it clearly isn’t happening with me. I just wish—”
But he shut me up by kissing me.
I should probably have fought him off. Slapped his face, kneed him where it hurt, bit his searching tongue. I had my ways. That would teach him to be so damned proprietary.
But I’d missed him, and tonight I needed that kiss far, far too badly to risk any of it.
